Poster image of 《Moment Untimely Encounter 2016》 © Alternative Space LOOP

This project is a critical reflection on modernity in Asia, examining how “impulse” operates within “biopolitics,” which has emerged from the collusion between neoliberalism and globalization in contemporary society. Depending on the accumulation, dissipation, transference, and disruption of emotions (affects), impulses may determine whether the governance of “life” leads toward collective annihilation or brings about fundamental transformation.

In this context, I regard the activities of artists as “performance” in a broad sense, and exhibitions as sites where the products, outcomes, and residues of these activities are mediated in various ways.

Here, a “moment” refers to a kind of “moment of rupture,” and I pay particular attention to the dimensions and movements of emotional (affective) impulses that emerge ambivalently and unexpectedly at such moments. Key concepts include generations and historical periods, artists and artworks, bodies and singularity, momentariness and temporality, and the local and the glocal. Within these relationships, I have closely examined the points of divergence at which seemingly identical things begin to manifest in different forms.

The participating artists are primarily multimedia artists, including performance artists from Singapore, photographers from Japan, and artists working with multimedia-based projects in Korea. The 2016 project 《Moment Untimely Encounter》, developed over approximately three years, involved field research with several participating artists, research on artists and contemporary art in Singapore, and ongoing discussions with scholars in Japan.

Throughout this process, I approached the present actions of artists (or contemporary subjects) as “performance.” In conducting research on the artists, I observed how their past works and projects, whether encountered through the artists themselves or through archives, continually reappear and circulate in the present through processes of repetition, circulation, overlapping, and residual persistence. These observations ultimately took shape in the form of an exhibition understood as the residue of performance.


Minja Gu, Pasta Nowadays, 2016, Performance © Minja Gu

If we look closely at what appear on the surface to be differences between generations, artworks, working methods, and ways of life, we find that these differences amount to little more than a series of similar things. They are differences that merely serve the purpose of substitution. What this exhibition focuses on, however, is something irreplaceable.

For instance, the question of whether the dimension of impulse within the collective affect of society moves toward hatred or toward action is not simply a choice between two opposing alternatives. The same applies to the stakes of guilt and shame in the actions of subjects who bring about change.

The mechanism of repetition does not refer to the repetition of the identical. An object of criticism can remain an object of criticism precisely because the fantasy surrounding it is still operative. Repetition, however, strips away this fantasy and demystifies the object, rendering it insignificant. In doing so, repetition creates a space for production. If this is a space of potentiality, then “impulse,” rather than coercion or obligation, becomes the mechanism through which that potentiality is actualized.

Thus, this exhibition examines the sites and events where impulses manifest symptomatically, as well as the possibility of their sustained existence. One example of this potentiality can be explored by examining the stakes involved in how the conception of “the human” in the 1990s—the ethical individual, the liberal subject of multiculturalism, and the respectable global citizen—is now being (pseudo-)repeated or retrospectively revisited in the 2010s.

If, just before the 1990s, political correctness, the celebration of multiculturalism, the emphasis on the role of respectable global citizens, and the bubble of cultural diversity emerged as forms of resistance to fascist nationalism and authoritarianism, the 2000s witnessed their neoliberal commodification and the effective operation of Foucauldian governmentality.

During this period, we once again found ourselves in a liberal-fascist condition, witnessing the emergence of bare life and the proliferation of extreme circumstances. Thus, while resisting the neo-fascist conditions that took shape during the 2000s, we also criticize the illusions of globalization and multiculturalism in the 1990s.

In the present context, this criticism has been reformulated into a 2000s-style critique (“What a bunch of romantic intellectuals”) and a 2010s-style critique (“In the end, that bubble gave rise to neo-fascism”). Amid all this, rather than insisting that we acknowledge the failure of globalization, what matters more is that globalization itself has become something ridiculous, something that no longer seems particularly significant.


Minja Gu, Hill, Hill and Hills, 2016, Video installation, 13 min 4 sec © Minja Gu

This demonstrates that the arrival of a dimension in which things are no longer interesting (where fantasy ceases to function) has created the conditions for a transformation into something genuinely different. One manifestation of these symptoms is a shift in affect.

For instance, throughout the 2000s, we witnessed the emergence of “exhaustion,” “apathy,” “sarcasm and cynicism,” “hatred,” and various forms of “perversion.” “Impulse,” which constitutes the ground for change, had become entangled in dimensions such as hatred. Yet impulse can suddenly shift, and with extraordinary intensity. It is clear that this movement reflects a “desire for the new and for change.”

What I draw upon to evoke the dimension of impulse within artistic media includes “shame,” “symptomatic phenomena,” and “certain contingent aspects of individual subjects’ bodies—such as the speed of their movements, facial expressions, and voices.” These impulses unfold through “violence_play_amusement at a fundamental level,” “jokes,” “sophistry,” and “ephemerality_duration_temporality,” among other elements.

Art no longer exists between “becoming abject” and “becoming sublime.” Rather, it resides between affective discomfort and temporal overlaps that appear anachronistic. In this way, art acquires a new form of abstraction and assumes the role of a “vanishing mediator” as a temporal medium. What we once called artists’ works or projects might now be better understood as “performance.”

Likewise, exhibitions might be better described as the afterimages or remaining residues of such performances. Although the residues of performances, destined to disappear physically, cannot be purchased at any price, they will never vanish from history. This is much like the relationship between living death and death itself. In other words, it is art that cannot be traded.

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